As companies grow, many companies understand that new employees must be trained to better adapt to the business environment and processes of the company, and existing employees must be trained and evaluated to continue their career path. “Ok, we need a learning system,” might say a manager of a newly created Training Department. But the reality is not so simple. There are hundreds of learning system providers and none of them can fully meet your requirements. So what can you do?
First of all, you must know the terminology that exists in the learning market. What you are looking for is probably called a Learning Management System or LMS. This can confuse many evaluators and buyers of learning systems by the wide variety of solutions offered as LMS. What is generally called an LMS includes classroom and e-learning management, content creation and publishing, communication and collaboration, assessment and evaluation, competency and performance management, reporting, analysis and integration with financial / HRIS systems. While the basic set of LMS features are: administration, learning management, reporting and measurement, security, functions related to human resources, content management, content integration and e-commerce. Analytics is an advanced feature and not all vendors include it in a basic LMS package. The analytics includes: measures of effectiveness, efficiency and compliance. As well as a performance management that is a new trend in the LMS market.
Second, LMS vendors identify three types of market: midsize which consists of companies with 1,000-10,000 students that can be small and medium-sized companies, companies that have more than 10,000 students, and global company with a worldwide location of Offices. So identify your niche and narrow down the list of vendors.
Third, there is an important criterion to think about: your company must have a human resources system already in place and in place that keeps records of all employees at your company’s head office and branch offices in one place. LMS is just an extension to such systems and is powered by HRIS (and sometimes financial systems). Data comes and goes, but it needs to be kept in one place for consistency.
However, a typical LMS product does not address the critical need to create, manage, and maintain learning system content. If the answer to your question about how to import your existing courses from different media is “You can’t unless they are SCORM compliant!”, And you have no idea what that means, then you probably have to create all of your courses from scratch. . Packages such as MS PowerPoint and MS Word, that is, all those commonly used by training departments to create learning materials, are not compatible with any existing learning standards. Then you need a course creation tool. This new class of learning products is called the Learning Content Management System and is purchased together with LMS. LMS and LCMS are not the same. Let me explain. Students enter a web portal, for example. That portal links the student to LMS-generated pages where students can select a course. That course is created by LCMS but delivered by LMS. So if you don’t have LCMS, either you have to buy courses from vendors or … or you don’t have courses. This is why you need to make sure that LCMS is actually a part of your LMS purchase and not a separate product. The content management that was mentioned as part of the basic LMS is not the same as LCMS because the latter deals with creating, storing, and delivering personalized learning content. Content management, on the other hand, deals with storing and indexing content for search.
In conclusion, the evaluator is advised to maintain an up-to-date knowledge of the LMS / LCMS products.
